Joachim Whaley's ground-breaking history of the Holy Roman Empire escapes the
shadow cast by the Nazis, finds Peter Oborne.

German history has been shaped by one central trauma: the rise of the Nazis culminating in the horror of the concentration camps. There has been an understandable tendency for scholars to interpret everything that went before as a prelude to the emergence of fascism.

Just as the Whig school notoriously interpreted the path of British history as an inexorable process leading to the triumph of parliamentary democracy in the 19th century, so the rise of Hitler has haunted German historians.

One major victim of this tendency has been the Holy Roman Empire, a sprawling confederation of German-speaking states that embraced Italy, Germany and much of France at one point in the high Middle Ages.

Contemporary historians have tended to lose interest in the Holy Roman Empire after the death in 1250 of Frederick II, the powerful and charismatic emperor who challenged the authority of the Pope. Thereafter they have assumed that the empire fell into decline, part of a pattern of neglect and institutional collapse that sowed the seeds for the failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis.

Indeed, in the words of one historian, the Holy Roman Empire had “no history at all” after the mid-17th century, though “it continued for a while longer to lead a miserable, meaningless existence because its patient, slow-moving subjects lacked the initiative and in many cases the intelligence to effect its actual dissolution”.

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The massive achievement of this superb and authoritative study is to rescue the Holy Roman Empire from the condescension of history. The Cambridge historian Joachim Whaley has reinterpreted the final 500 years of the Holy Roman Empire as a story of success not failure, and stability rather than disintegration.

In doing so he has overturned received wisdom. Take the normal verdict on the Peace of Westphalia, which brought to an end the Thirty Years War in 1648. Historians have tended to interpret it as the dark moment when the burst of progressive energy unleashed by the Reformation was dimmed, and a new era of reaction began.

Whaley, by contrast, salutes Westphalia for creating a system that would last a further 160 years until Napoleon’s army wrecked the Holy Roman Empire once and for all in 1806. “The legal and constitutional framework of the Holy Roman Empire was far more robust than previously realised,” he writes, “and a formidable force for stability over centuries.”

Whaley’s portrayal of the Holy Roman Empire, with checks and balances and loose connections between a central state and its strong local tributaries, governed by a culture of compromise and negotiation, feels like a model of good government in an age when we have learnt to fear the power of the individual nation state.

The Holy Roman Empire, writes Whaley, sustained “an imperial framework that ultimately facilitated the peaceful coexistence of the major Christian denominations; an imperial system which preserved the independent existence of even the smallest subsidiary unit against the predatory inclinations and ambitions of the largest ones, and which provided mechanisms whereby the subjects of all of them could appeal against their overlords through the imperial courts.”

It is hard to overestimate the scale of Whaley’s achievement. The Holy Roman Empire was a labyrinth of hundreds of tiny princedoms, duchies, bishoprics and independent city states, each with its own jurisdictions and special patterns of allegiance. Yet Whaley effortlessly weaves them together.

The scholarship in this book is profound, with the bibliography alone stretching to some 70 pages. Whaley’s two volumes total nearly 1,400 pages, yet it is a surprisingly easy read. Above all Whaley has rewritten the course of German history by suggesting that there was nothing about German society, culture or political structure that created the conditions for 20th-century authoritarianism.

If he is right there is less need to dive back into Germany’s alleged dark past to explain the horror of the mid-20th century, while the immediate circumstances that led to the rise of Hitler – the legacy of the First World War – become much more relevant. There is therefore also no need to be frightened of a powerful Germany at the heart of Europe. It may be indeed that the once despised Holy Roman Empire would serve as a decent model for a peaceful European future.